So when I was a kid in the 80s, I would always get SUPER excited for getting a new game.
We’d get in the car, drive to Toys R Us, and in the video game section was basically an homage to Nintendo. So much so that the descriptors at the end of the isles didn’t say “video games”, it said “Nintendo”. Sure, they sold Sega and Atari too…but it was the Nintendo isle.
So you’d pick your game, and on the drive home you would flip through your new game manual. Remember game manuals??? You’d learn all about this new world. Who was this “Zelda” if the main character was a boy??? What kind of world was this??? It looks HUGE!!! DO YOU SEE ALL THESE DIFFERENT ENEMIES???
Finally (after like 10 minutes), you’d get home. You’d race to the door, only for you to realize that you need dad to unlock the door. Now, dad was probably walking at a normal pace, but to a hyper 6 year old excited to play with his new toy, he may as well have been a dried out turtle. Or a sloth.
FINALLY he opens the front door, and you go rushing to the TV. You put the cartridge in, and you’re ready to play. You turn the power on, and you’re already at the name screen. After you put in the name “Dork”, because you’re an edgy 80s kid, you’re already in front of a cave. Oh god…what’s in there??? How do I fight monsters??? THE BUTTONS DO NOTHING!!! Oh god, oh god, here we go, we’re going in the cave…
And you all know how it plays out from there.
These days, it’s a bit different. These days a game gets announced and you wait for release day. Then you turn on your console, and you buy the game. Now you gotta wait for an hour for it to download. Thats assuming your console doesn’t need an update. So now you’re waiting…and waiting…and waiting…
Eventually it’s all done, and you boot the game up, but theres a day 1 update. So more waiting. FINALLY after an hour and a half it’s done.
So you boot it up, and you don’t get that same sense of wonderment. It’s because todays games have been done to death. Every game is a post appocolytic shooter where the emphisis is on online play. So now you already know what you’re getting, and you gotta wait again for online lobbies to start.
And when Nintendo released the Super Nintendo it was a radical jump in performance in every sense on a platform that was revolutionary to start with. It was must have technology.
Now, 50% of PS4 users haven’t upgraded to a newer system. And why? Because the PS5 looks like a slight visual upgrade in apperance, and zero upgrade in performance. Games look and feel mostly the same as they would on PS4. And the games are all the same. Microtransactions, unimaginative plots, forgetable characters, sequals reboots prequals. We’re seeing the same franchises, with the same characters doing the same things for 30 years. Mario is still saving the princess for Bowser. At this point, Peach is just LETTING herself get kidnapped. Zelda is going to save Link now in the new game…which would be a new concept, playing as Zelda, except Shiek was Zelda the whole time. Oops, spoilers on a 26 year old game.
Breath of the Wild had that samr sense of childhood wonder. But only if you actively avoided online discussions, youtube videos, social media. It was a barrage of avoiding spoilers, but I did it, and March 3rd 2017 was GLORIOUS. It’s also the last time I felt that need to get a new console.
I regretted buying a PS4, but for some stupid reason I bought a PS5 this year. I regret it. I see no system seller.
And thats another thing. Why can’t the games give you the option to play from disc, rather than install everything? Most games are like 50-100gb. It eats up storage REAL quick. Now you gotta decide "ok, which games do I want to delete, and which am I going to use soon?
Theres NO reason for me to justify 45gb on my hard drive for the PS4 version of Madden 19, when all I do is play exhibition. But I also don’t want to delete it, and reinstall it every few months on the off chance I want yo play 20 minutes of 1 game.
Sure, maybe Madden diehards get use out of that 45gb. I do not. I don’t play season. I do give a shit about those madden cards. I only play exhibition, 1 game, maybe once every 4 months. Same with NHL. Same with MLB.
Why must I take up like 200gb for games I play casually and sparingly, and almost ALWAYS have to sit through an update before I throw the ball? I don’t even care about roster updates. Unless they’re on Cleveland’s team, I don’t know any of these players. I don’t give a shit that Joe Whatshisname used to play for Chicago, but now he plays in New York.
I just want to pop in the disc, and play. No bullshit.
I wish Madden 95 worked on the SNES classic. It’s the last SNES version that Cleveland had a team.
But instead now, every single game comes with forced bullshit
You’re getting so many responses that are just “have you tried indie games?” or trying to dispel the rose-colored glasses. I suspect it’s because of the headline saying modern gaming sucks, which I think can be pretty objectively disproven.
That said, I can tell you about my experiment. I’ve instituted a program with my 12 year old stepson where he can earn marbles through chores and other tasks, and he can trade those marbles in for retro games I find in local stores and flea markets. One of the things he can also buy for a very low price is a downloaded retro magazine from retromags.com - he can ask for an issue with a particular topic in it and I’ll find one and send it to him. He isn’t really very internet savvy yet, so he’s not likely to hit up IGN for info or anything.
The result of this so far (only a few weeks in) has been serious excitement and engagement. He has access to Xbox Series and PS5 consoles, but getting to own physical games and accessories (we play them on a Retron 3 HD console) has motivated him more than I’ve seen almost anything else do. He keeps asking me if Street Fighter 2 will come to the “store” anytime soon because of my stories of how badly I wanted that game as a kid his age. Little does he know that for Christmas he’ll be getting an excellent condition, complete in box copy of Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition for the Genesis. He’s gonna flip.
The upshot of all this is that I really do think there was a certain magic to the experience back then. I’m doing my damnedest to recreate that magic for him, and so far it’s at least kinda working!
This is a nice story. I like this. My parents would occasionally buy me games, but it was mostly once or twice a year, and they never got excited for my excitement. They would just complain that all I do is play video games. Meanwhile all dad did was watch sports, and all mom did was watch news.
But somehow I’M an asshole 7 year old for not playing outside, and being glued to the tv all day! I’m ranting, but yes, 40 year old me is still pissed at my parents.
Getting back on track, I think it’s adorable how you not only engage with your kid, and teach him the value of earning things. And participate with your kid.
Makes me wonder if you were a fan of the aki wrestling games on N64. There’s a definate depth to those games that you don’t find in todays wrestling games. AEW tried…but I feel like their third game they might start getting it right. For reference, they’ve only made 1 game, and it took 4 years to make.
Same same. I literally have hundreds, if not thousands, of games in my digital libraries. The absolute entertainment value of that is astronomical, but at the same time, the experience of receiving any given game has become devalued to the point of meaninglessness in some cases.
I wanted to try and recreate that feeling of reading about a game, falling in love with every screenshot and drop of info, and working hard (or begging hard) to get it as one of the 2, maybe 3 games you’d get in a year. You read the manual twice on the car ride home, you save the box, you learn everything about it. I’ve told him about pausing the NES because you just got farther than you ever got before, you only have one life left, and you need to go to school. The idea of having an experience like that is being lost in today’s culture in my opinion.
Edit: Forgot to answer, no, I have not tried the Aki wrestling games. I only ever played WCW/NWO World Tour for a while in college with my buddies for the four-player bikinis, but I never really was into wrestling games or TV otherwise.
That’s the first of the US released Aki games! It went in order of release:
WCW/NWO World tour
WCW/NWO Revenge
WWF Wrestlemania 2000
WWF No Mercy (considered to this day to be the greatest wrestling game of all time).
I only mentioned them because I had fond memories of couch co-op with my friends. It’s one of those games that started with a starting point (the one you played), and each new game they added more and more content to the new game, while keeping everything from the old game.
I was just hoping with your son getting that appriciation for anticipating a new game, that you could start him with the first game, and end with the 4th.
But it’s one of those games that new people tend to struggle with, due to not holding your hand at ALL. It was just assumed you knew what you were doing…and the fighting system is sooooo complex, yet simple once you “get it”.
Short tap A, weak grapple. Long hold A, strong grapple.
Same with B and punches.
You CAN try to just so strong punches, and strong grapples, but if your opponent hasn’t been weakened they’re likely to reverse. They MIGHT still reverse a weak punch or grapple too, but they need much more precise button timing. The worse they’re beaten up, the harder it is to reverse. And eventually you might land a strong punch or grapple. You can taunt to raise your spirit meter. Your spirit meter also raises as you do well in a match, or lower if you do worse.
Throw your opponent down and do a short taunt before he gets up to stop your taunt, and you get an instant small boost in spirit. Do a long uninterupted taunt, and get a big boost in spirit.
But if you attempt a taunt, you leave yourself open to an easy attack against you, and if that happens you lose spirit proportional to what you were attempting to gain.
Its a very balanced game where every action has an appropriate reaction. It’s up to you to time those actions, and choose what you think you can get away with.
It’s such a weird game that an experienced player vs a rookie will result in an unfun lopsided match. But evenly matched players might have 1 match last an hour.
Oh, haha I thought I’d heard of Aki in the context of wrestling games, but assumed I must have been thinking Yuke’s.
Currently we’re sticking to 8-bit and 16-bit, though we’ll eventually start graduating into PS1 and so on. He doesn’t really have any awareness of or demonstrated interest in wrestling yet, but I’ll keep it in mind. I always did envy WCW/NWO Revenge when it came out…